"To say that Kwan promotes a queer sensibility in his understanding of
Chinese cultural and cinematic traditions does not entail arguing that
these traditions are originally unqueer, or that their queerness is more or
less Kwan’s invention. It does, however, rehearse the Foucauldian
conception of gender and sexuality as shaped by discourse, or, in Sang
Tze-lan’s words, as subject to new and shifting frameworks of
signification and perception. This resignification of preexisting crossgender
and same-sex phenomena is discernible but simultaneously
obliterated in the English subtitles to Kwan’s narration. On the one hand,
the Chinese phrases that predominate Kwan’s discussion of sexuality –
such as tongxing qingyu (same-sex desire or homoeroticism), xingbie
daocuo (gender confusion or gender inversion) or bianxing (literally sex
change or transsexual) – make it relatively easy for the translator, since
they have an origin in the language of Euro-American sexual discourse
and have been circulated in Chinese communities, sometimes even
gaining in popularity through GLBTQ (gay-lesbian-bi-trans-queer)
movements. Yet when Kwan employs argot specific to the cross-gender
performance in Chinese cultural practices, the subtitles inevitably
decontextualize the practices and render the argot as isomorphic with
queer terms, partly because of the imperative to immediately provide an
approximate English equivalent. In both Kwan’s narration and the
English subtitles, phrases that entail a historicized understanding of
Chinese literary and theatrical traditions, such as yizhuang (literally,
‘changing apparel’) and fanchuan (reverse role-play), are then resignified
as (and reduced to) transvestitism and drag.
In highlighting the link between postmodern polysexual sensibility
and traditional cultural forms of sexual organization, Kwan encodes
these forms as queerly transgressive. And in laying bare and
reinterpreting as queer the elements that seem to have been closeted in
Chinese-language cinemas, Yang+ Yin, to borrow Berry’s insight, blurs
not only the past–present distinction underlying the construction of
Chinese modern nations but also the East–West boundary constitutive of
neo-Confucian, East Asian modernity. As a cine-genealogy showcasing
both national cinema and Chinese queerness, Yang+ Yin certainly
realizes the political imperative advocated by international queer studies
to pluralize a national or cultural identity with queer subjects and to
reverse the hegemonic containment of sexual minorities. Kwan’s
emphasis on alternative genders and sexualities in Chinese-language
cinemas is especially meaningful in this singular ‘Chinese’ context.
However, if we shift our critical gaze to a transnational framework, the
film immediately evokes a more dubious cultural politics. For example,
Kwan’s compilation of cinematic texts originating from Hong Kong,
Taiwan and China is itself a transnational act under the pretext of
historical, cultural and social homogeneity. The film overlooks the
fluctuating political animosity or sympathy between these communities
and the distinct historical trajectories that have marked the consciousness
of each populace, as most textual elements operate on the dubious
premisses of Hong Kong’s, Taiwan’s and China’s shared cultural
heritage and sociological proximity. ‘Crossdressing’, Kwan says in the
last chapter, ‘is a formative element of our culture’ (emphasis added).
Putting aside his mother tongue (Cantonese) and delivering his narration
in Mandarin (the official language of China, Taiwan and post-1997 Hong
Kong), Kwan glides over the geopolitical disparities demarcated by the
three countries’ films to address a pan-Chinese consciousness. (The
chapter ‘Fathers are Everywhere’, for example, moves in a swift and
haphazard way between the works and interviews of Hou Hsiao-hsien,
Ang Lee, Chen Kaige, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang and Allen Fong).
In short, the queerness reconstituted by Kwan as Chinese is pan-Chinese
or trans-Chinese, which underpins the resurgent geopolitics of ‘Greater
China’ or ‘Cultural China’, terms that refer to the economically or
culturally integrated zone consisting of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
With all its queerness, Yang+ Yin feeds into another discourse of
collective identity and perpetuates the myth of Chinese culturalism."
from Queering Chinese-language cinemas: Stanley Kwan’s Yang+ Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema
by CHIA-CHI WU , Screen 51:1 Spring 2010
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